A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Jack Profumo was tormented by what he had done. As the Labour opposition leader, Harold Wilson, sent Macmillan further lurid allegations that Ward had tried to get nuclear secrets from Profumo, using Keeler and pillow-talk, the minister fled on holiday to Italy. He there admitted the truth to his wife and returned to make a public confession. He was instantly ruined, spent the rest of his life in private voluntary work in London, atoning for what he had done, and ended his life widely respected and officially honoured for his charity work. But you never escape a name that memorable. More than forty years on, newspaper billboards announced: ‘Sex Scandal Minister Dies’. Back in 1963 the press was in particularly vengeful mood. During his trial for living off the earnings of prostitution, Ward killed himself with an overdose. In the most famous words uttered as the tale unfolded, Mandy Rice-Davies, Keeler’s friend, was asked in court about Lord Astor’s denial that he had had sex with her. She replied: ‘He would say that, wouldn’t he?’ The frankness of her assumption that yes, of course, rich and powerful men were liars, caught the nation’s mood. Most such scandals simply end. The headlines yellow, the victims limp off to try to rebuild their lives and politics thunders on as usual. The Profumo affair was different. There was a famous inquiry into it by the judge Lord Denning. His report was a bestseller when published by the government, rivalling the Beveridge Report of twenty years earlier. (The different subjects and tone tell us something about Britain’s journey.) Denning cleared MI5 of failure, minimized any security aspect and concluded that Ivanov and Profumo were not sharing Keeler’s bed. Yet very shortly afterwards, in a very tight race, Labour would win the 1964 general election by just four seats. It is a tiny margin. The Profumo affair caused such national interest that it might well have tipped the balance against the Tories.

  If so, it was a vote against a closed world of interconnecting relationships from which too many British people felt excluded. Macmillan himself had led a blameless, indeed celibate, life in late adulthood after his wife’s long affair with a fellow politician, Bob Boothby. But the tight connections between a small number of powerful political and social players were particularly intense in the fifties, before the democratizing effect of the sixties’ educational and cultural revolution. The Profumo affair brought both worlds together, in collision. Astor and Profumo, the mistresses and the discreet introductions in London clubs, all came from the old world. The drug-smuggling boyfriend with a gun and the good-time girls from working class backgrounds, unshockable and impossible to intimidate, were characters from the new Britain taking shape around Macmillan. Universes collided. Energy was released. Its noise was heard as the ‘satire boom’.

  48

  Beyond the Fringe

  Political satire, which had been exuberantly popular in Georgian times, had become duller during the noontide of Empire, and now returned in full force, from savage cartoons in the newspapers, staged lampoons, and the fortnightly mockery of the magazine Private Eye. It can be tempting to treat comedy like a ball being passed down the line in a game of rugby. Among the two million regular listeners to The Goon Show in the mid-fifties were key members of the next generation of comics, who would sting more, men such as Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook. The Goons pass to Beyond the Fringe; Beyond the Fringe passes to Monty Python’s Flying Circus; they pass to Little Britain, and so on until the touch-judge puts a flag up and stops play. Each generation does indeed catch the humour of the previous one, changes it and throws it on. Peter Cook, who is Spike Milligan’s only rival as the outstanding comic genius of the age, as a schoolboy sent a script to the BBC good enough for Milligan to invite him up to London for lunch. In turn, the generation of comedians who created Monty Python’s Flying Circus were transfixed by Cook and his friends. But the origins of the comedy keep changing. The real difference between Milligan and Secombe, and indeed many other war-trained comedians making names for themselves in post-war London, and the next lot, was public school. Had R.A. Butler acted on his original instinct and broken down the ancient class divide in British education, the country’s humour would have been very different. By the 1960s, the flow of lower-middle-class and working-class children through grammar schools and into the universities was strongly affecting the atmosphere of the whole country. But in the decade after the war, the private schools still dominated things. They were often bleak institutions. The austerity years meant little heating, poor food and few modern facilities, a life decorated by brutal customs and petty hierarchies often dating back to the reign of Queen Victoria.

  Peter Cook’s school, Radley in Oxfordshire, deployed a private vocabulary, frequent beatings, cold showers, complicated rules about which buttons which boys were allowed to do up, compulsory star-jumps, thumpings with hockey sticks for minor transgressions, and of course a great deal of bullying, undeterred by the staff. This forced bright but vulnerable children like Cook to develop mimickry and mockery to deflect bullies – which in his case included the England cricket captain to be, Ted Dexter. Cook’s biographer, Harry Thompson, himself a noted comic, quoted Cook explaining how he would make people laugh in order that they would not hit him. Thompson asked: ‘How many times, over the years, has the British comedy industry had cause to be grateful to generations of public school bullies?’ Richard Ingrams, editor of Private Eye, cut his comic teeth at Shrewsbury School, sitting high above the River Severn, and at least as weird as Radley. Its new boys were called ‘douls’ after the Greek for slave; its day started with cold baths; it too had a byzantine dress code, involving different colours of scarf, tie and waistcoat, buttons done up or not, and the rest; when the whole school was sent on cross-country runs, the boys were chased by men with whips. Ingrams’s humour was less about mimickry; instead he, Paul Foot and Willie Rushton, who would join him at Private Eye, turned to writing mock school magazines.

  At Radley and Shrewsbury as in scores of other similar schools, such as John Cleese’s Clifton College in Bristol, or indeed Prince Charles’s Gordonstoun in Scotland, boys developed underground languages to cope with their aggressive and closed communities. They knew little of women, which meant the humour that emerged from this was often toe-curlingly juvenile about sex. They were rarely politically radical. They were from a privileged elite, after all. Cook’s father had been a colonial civil servant in Nigeria and Gibraltar. Ingrams was the son of an eccentric banker and intelligence agent, a one-time member of the pro-Nazi Anglo-German Fellowship Society, and a Catholic mother whose father had been Queen Victoria’s doctor. Both men were brought up to look down on the working classes as essentially inferior and comic, though Ingrams would have his perspective shifted as a soldier during the Korean War. Their satire would be biting, with underlying layers of anger and hurt. But it would be very public-schoolboyish too, tittering and often snobby.

  The brightest then went on to Cambridge or Oxford, still then mostly male societies, and where in those days there was a direct line from the world of Oxbridge student reviews to the West End. Future satirists mingled with fellow students who would go on to become politicians and business leaders. Thompson points out that this too would affect the style of comedy soon to sweep middle-class Britain. Peter Cook’s generation at Cambridge in 1957 would include the later Conservative cabinet ministers Michael Howard, Kenneth Clarke and Leon Brittan, as well as numerous actors and impresarios: ‘One reason that Oxbridge has traditionally produced so many political satirists is that its undergraduates come face to face with their future political leaders at an early age, and realise then quite how many of them are social retards who join debating societies in order to find friends.’ (Though in fairness it should be added that the same can apply to those joining student theatre companies and satirical magazines.) At Cambridge, Cook simply transferred his monotone sketches about the Radley school butler, to the new environment and eventually had half the undergraduates mimicking him and repeating his one-liners. Sometimes comic success is just a voice. Cook found his voice as a schoolboy and essentially never lost i
t; the same deadpan, bathetic philosophy swept from public school to Cambridge to Edinburgh’s Beyond the Fringe review, to London, New York and immortality. Ingrams and Rushton, similarly, transferred their jokes and cartoon characters from a school magazine to a student one, and then, with others, to Private Eye. Around these people were many others from different backgrounds who would become just as important in the story of British comedy – Alan Bennett, the Yorkshire grammar school boy; Dudley Moore, the working-class boy from Dagenham; David Frost, the Methodist preacher’s son from Kent. But the dominant personalities of Cook and Ingrams gave them a particular hold over the satire boom.

  The day when the traditional Establishment decided it had to acknowledge its critical cousin, the comedy establishment, was 28 February 1962. The Queen visited Beyond the Fringe in London’s Fortune Theatre to see the vicious caricature of her prime minister by Peter Cook. Cook had done his Macmillan at Cambridge and at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe already. In London he had been playing to packed houses since the previous May. There had been protests and walk-outs by people outraged at seeing the Queen’s first minister lampooned in public. But the Queen herself roared with laughter. After this Macmillan, determined to show he was a good sport and could take a joke, decided to go along too. This was a mistake. Other Tory cabinet ministers had seen it already but when the Prime Minister arrived, Cook spotted him in the audience and deviated from his script. In an Edwardian drawl, he told Macmillan: ‘When I’ve a spare evening, there’s nothing I like better than to wander over to a theatre and sit there listening to a group of sappy, urgent, vibrant young satirists, with a stupid great grin spread all over my silly old face.’

  The crueller the political comedy, the greater its success. Shortly afterwards, Cook opened the briefly famous Establishment Club in Soho as the capital of the new satire movement. Every night comedy and music would be offered, along with trendy new foods and a bar. It was mobbed and its membership included much of the old Establishment. Everybody, it seemed, wanted a part of the new comedy, including some who weren’t very funny themselves. A spin-off revue, where David Frost was doing his own version of Cook’s Macmillan, was visited by the gangsters of the moment, the Kray twins. A few months after the Queen’s visit, Cook bought the fledgling Private Eye too, where Richard Ingrams would soon become editor. The BBC was just holding its breath to see whether the satire boom could survive on-screen, with That Was the Week That Was, again compered by Frost. It ran for a short season until hurriedly taken off the air as the 1964 election approached. For a short time it seemed that a small bunch of university comics had created a republic of laughter strong enough to change the country.

  This was an illusion, never shared by the key players themselves. Cook had had the idea for his club many years earlier visiting West Germany, and would refer wryly to the ‘great tradition of those satirical clubs of the 1930s that had done so much to prevent the rise of Adolf Hitler’. He said different things at different times about Macmillan and the Tories. Right-wing friends tended to think he was right-wing, and socialists thought he was one of theirs, but if Peter Cook had any politics they were never consistent and always took second place to a good punchline. Richard Ingrams was certainly no socialist; his independent-minded Tory radicalism allowed him to flay party placemen from all sides and he was compared to that great nineteenth-century radical Tory William Cobbett. Harold Wilson, observing with delight the satirical onslaught on Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home, later tried to ingratiate himself with Private Eye when he became Prime Minister, inviting Ingrams to Downing Street and professing himself a great admirer of satire. His reward was to become one of the magazine’s most loathed and aggressively pursued targets as the Labour years rolled on.

  There were politically minded people at the edges of the satire movement of the early sixties, many of them radicalized by CND and on the left of the Labour Party. Fluck and Law, who would go on to create the latex puppetry of Spitting Image, were socialist friends of Peter Cook’s. Richard Ingrams’ closest friend was probably Paul Foot, nephew of the Labour politician Michael Foot, who became a leading light in the Socialist Workers’ Party and a fine investigative journalist. But there was no organic link between the left of British politics and the wave of comedians, mimics and journalists who tore down the façade of Tory Britain fifteen years after the war. There could not have been. Too many of the satirists were public schoolboys, getting their own back on the nation’s authority figures just as they tried to get their own back on schoolmasters and bullies. Macmillan was for them, in essence, just the head of a decaying prep school. Labour was full of lower-middle-class and working-class people with their funny accents and limited little lives. If there was any alliance, it was very short and entirely one of convenience.

  49

  Conclusion: A Country of Cliques is Over

  The story of Britain in the years after the fall of Attlee’s New Jerusalem, and before the sixties really began to swing is the story of a country still run by cliques and in-groups, rather than by visionary individuals, still less the masses. Understand the networks, the clubs and the personal associations and you understand the system. For the Tories, public school and Oxbridge links, even family ones, had provided the fusebox of power. Post-war growth had given clique politics a good run. But this Britain eventually failed. It failed over Suez, over the growing signs of economic failure, in its late attempt to copy French central planning and in its inability to grasp the new culture and society growing up all around it. The symbols of that failure were the spy scandals, the Profumo affair and the rising froth of satirical laughter. Macmillan had finished it off, bloodily, on ‘the Night of the Long Knives’. Before this act of almost domestic butchery there was still a notion that the chaps at the Turf Club, the old families with their stalking and salmon rivers, that web of Old Etonian cronies, could maintain British authority and self-confidence, despite the local difficulties of a disintegrating Empire and a weak economy; that they could hang together. Patently, they could not.

  The final stage in the collapse of the old authority came with Macmillan’s illness and resignation, and the stitch-up which eventually put the bony, amiable, slightly bemused Lord Home of the Hirsel into Number Ten as the fourth Tory Prime Minister in a row. Much of British politics still came down to class, which threw up many ironies. In this case it was the long, ultimately successful legal fight by a Labour leftwinger, Lord Stansgate, better known as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, better known still as Tony Benn, to disclaim or throw off his peerage. His success in court electrified the Tory struggle. There were Tories in the Commons who were popular candidates to replace Macmillan, above all Rab Butler. Yet the new ability to fling off a coronet and become a commoner and thus possibly an MP in the Commons, meant two other prominent Conservatives could now take part in the race. One was Lord Hailsham, a clever, popular but ultimately rather undignified man, favoured by Macmillan. The other was Lord Home. Macmillan was far less ill than he thought but the news that he would go turned the Tory conference of October 1963, normally a placid and deferential gathering, into wild and hysterical seaside hustings. Lord Hailsham made it clear he would renounce his peerage but then discredited himself with a display of crude and exhibitionistic self-promotion. Macmillan quickly dropped him as favourite, some suggest because he did not want a successor who would be there for long, just in case he could manage a comeback. Rab Butler made a poor speech, leading some to wonder if he really wanted to be prime minister; he was a great mind, and much admired by the brighter Tories, but he lacked the slightest evidence of killer instinct. Enoch Powell, one of his supporters, said they had put the gun in his hands, but he refused to fire it. Macmillan coldly dismissed him as lacking ‘the last six inches of steel’. Up in London, Macmillan was still ill in bed and arranged for the various grandees of the party to ‘take soundings’ among the MPs, party workers, peers and constituency chairmen. This highly unscientific survey produced Lord Home’s name and he was duly propo
sed by Macmillan, invited by the Queen, accepted, renounced his peerage, won a by-election in a then-tame Scottish Tory constituency and duly entered Number Ten. Fast work milord.

  Widely liked but self-effacing, Lord Home, Macmillan’s Foreign Secretary, had a political career which led right back to the Chamberlain government and the Munich appeasement of Hitler. This did not and should not have counted against him entirely. Butler had also been an appeaser; so had, for a while, Hailsham; indeed, so had most of the Tory Party at the time. But Home seemed utterly against the spirit of the new decade. He was the ultimate grouse-moor Tory, but without Macmillan’s wily toughness. Not just a toff but worse, a nice toff. The idea outraged many Tories, notably Hailsham and the liberal Iain Macleod. Powell was equally livid and both men refused to serve under Home, who was described by press commentators at the time as ‘a cretin’ and ‘this half-witted Earl’. In a famous article in the Spectator, Iain Macleod as editor attacked the choice as a stitch-up by the Conservative Party’s ‘magic circle’. He narrated the key soundings, involving Macmillan and functionaries such as Lords Dilhorne, Poole and St Aldwyn, pointing out in a devastating aside: ‘Eight of the nine men mentioned in the last sentence went to Eton.’